Signing Matters

1
Virtual Human Signing Research at UEA John
Glauert, Ralph Elliott, Richard Kennaway,Kevin
Parsons, Judy Tryggvason, Vince Jennings
School of Computing Sciences
Signing Matters 1 in 1000 people become deaf
before they have acquired speech and may always
have a low reading age for written English. Sign
is their natural language. British Sign Language
(BSL) has its own grammar and linguistic
structure that is not based on English which has
a phonetic basis. For educational purposes, use
is made of Sign Supported English (SSE), a
simplified language that lacks the richness of a
true natural language. Since deaf people do not
necessarily find information easy to absorb in
text, their access to services is restricted,
despite the requirements of recent legislation.
There is little support for digital services in
sign. Using Virtual Human
Avatars Much of the work is based on animation of
Virtual Humans, or Avatars. This work is partly
in collaboration with Televirtual Ltd, a local
television and multimedia company. Avatars bring
the benefit of a relatively compact
representation of gestures. Since avatars exist
as 3-D models, they support choice of the
appearance, viewpoint, and size of the character.
Techniques enable signing sequences captured from
different sources to be blended seamlessly. Video
provides high realism, but editing and blending
of sequences is impractical. Recent projects at
UEA include Simon the Signer, winner of two Royal
Television Society Awards, and TESSA, winner of
the BCS Gold Medal and top IT Award, undertaken
within the EU ViSiCAST project. Broadcast
Transmitting Avatar Signing Research with the
BBC, funded by the DTI, is developing robust
techniques for capturing the facial and manual
gestures of a live sign language interpreter. The
motion data provides a low-bandwidth data stream
that can be transmitted and used in the set top
box to animate the bones of a 3-D signing
avatar. The avatar character itself, and its
position, size, pose, and lighting can be placed
under user control. References For
further information and papers see
http//www.visicast.cmp.uea.ac.uk.
The Academic Challenge of Signing Signing
presents an important and beneficial academic
challenge as it provides a purely visual
communications channel. Signing also exploits
multiple modalities since gestures combine facial
expressions with bodily and manual configuration
and motion. Research at UEA addresses the
linguistics of sign language, where little is
documented about grammar and semantics. We are
also exploring the generation of signing by
developing notations for gesture, and using them
to synthesise faithful animations of sign from
notation. Further, there is work on capture of
human motion via video and use of motion sensors,
leading to attempts to recognise signs from
motion data.
Video Stream
CaptureSystem
Set Top Box
Animation Stream
School of Computing Sciences, University of East
Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK. Tel 44 1603
592847 Fax [phone] http//www.cmp.uea.a
c.uk/